Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  “I just need to use your cell phone.”

  “Don’t have one,” I confessed, that alone grounds enough to get me drummed out of the Screenwriters Guild.

  I like being unplugged and got rid of my cell last fall, long after it had stopped ringing.

  “I need to call the police.”

  My interest piqued, I finally noticed the expensive 35mm camera with telephoto lens slung over his shoulder. Camera Guy didn’t reek of booze or dumpster-diving.

  “Why?”

  “I’m in trouble. Please, one quick call?”

  I nodded and said I’d get my cordless. He started to follow me inside, but curiosity doesn’t mean all caution to the wind. I ordered him to wait, ducked inside, and considered throwing the deadbolt and returning to bed.

  But ignoring Camera Guy might spark a rage he could vent on my ’67 Mustang, defenseless in the driveway below.

  Plus, he’d managed to rouse my long-slumbering muse, now starting to riff about an old hippie packing an expensive camera, but without change enough for a pay phone. I stood pondering all this in the living room until Camera Guy knocked again. Best not keep my new collaborator waiting.

  He accepted the phone and announced, “Four-one-one,” while punching in digits. “Yes, Operator,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the motel up the street. “Please connect me to the Boston Police Department.”

  Boston? I was so intrigued now that it didn’t occur to me that I’d be footing the long distance.

  “Damn.” He mashed the OFF button. “It didn’t go through.”

  “Why Boston?” I asked, taking back the phone. “Why not the local cops?”

  “Long story.” He plunged his hands into pockets that bulged with what looked like film canisters. “You wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay.” He licked thin lips and announced, “I’m Jay Maxwell Marshall.”

  “Hi, Jay. Tim Wolfe.”

  We shook as he again gazed up the street. “My family owns a fair-sized chunk of Boston.”

  “Landed gentry, eh? So, you out slumming?”

  “I haven’t seen them in years,” he said dismissively. “My brother Cal tracked me down ‘cause our mom just died.”

  “Sorry,” I said, reminded of my Alzheimer’s-addled mother, tended to by the Stokley clan back East. She always believed in me, offered encouragement to flee the Rust Belt and follow my star. “You are my brightest child, Timmy, the one who doesn’t belong here.” She even understood my need for reinvention, that little Timmy Stokley, caterpillar from Ashton, Ohio, had to emerge from the So Cal chrysalis as Tim Wolfe, screenwriter.

  I felt guilty about Mom getting sick, but couldn’t help her until I was back in the chips. I hadn’t penned a hit in the six years since my Oscar-nominated script for Teenage Wasteland, and the Hollywood suits had written me off like a bad debt. Only a home run could get me back in the game, and now fate had delivered Camera Guy to my door.

  “Never liked my mother,” he was confessing. “But going home for the funeral seemed important.”

  “Sure.”

  “I booked a flight, but blew the money Cal wired me before picking up the ticket.”

  “On that?” I pointed to the Nikon.

  “No, I’ve always had cameras, my armor against the world’s unending bullshit. Words can be spun to serve any lie, Tim, but pictures tell the truth.”

  Toil in Hollywood and you quickly learn that film is the most convincing friend a lie ever had. My enthusiasm ebbed as I realized no streetwise wisdom would be forthcoming. Jay Max was just another deluded schlub, but I couldn’t dismiss him just yet, not with any chance that the rough ore of his life could be mined for fictive gold.

  “So what’s with the cops?” I asked, steering him back toward the plot. “And why Boston?”

  Jay glanced down at his camera, stroked the lens. “You got me in trouble again, huh? But then the truth usually does.” His head snapped up suddenly, hazy eyes coming into sharp focus. “They need to bury the truth, Tim, and me along with it. That’s why the wanted poster’s at the post office.”

  “You’re starting to lose me, Jay. What wanted poster?”

  “People think they don’t have them at the post office anymore, but people just have lazy eyes. The posters are still there, tacked to corner bulletin boards, taped here and there among the long rows of boxes...”

  Jeez, I thought, he rambles more than me. “A wanted poster of who?”

  “A very bad man, charged with terrorism and plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Funny.” Jay laughed, a jagged titter that sounded like he was about to vomit up broken glass.

  “Yeah, terrorism is a scream.”

  “No, funny because the picture was of me.”

  “Oh-kay.” Realizing that I was jawing with a full-blown paranoid, I made sure the door was still cracked open, line of retreat clear should Jay’s cork pop completely. “But of course you’re not guilty.”

  Again he surveyed the street behind us. “No, but plenty of bogus evidence has doubtless been cooked up to prove otherwise.”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  “The real evidence is here.” He patted the film canisters in his pocket. “It’ll disappear, unless I can get it into the right hands. I was calling an old friend who maybe could help, a police captain in Boston.”

  “Try him again,” I said, offering the phone.

  “My old man was a spook years ago, CIA, before joining the family banking biz,” Jay said, words rushing out of him now. “He drank when Mom was away, told enough stories for me to know the Company’s involved in this somehow. Well, I’ll show ’em.” He grinned, a slash of yellow teeth. “I’ll call their worst enemy.”

  “Osama?”

  “No,” he said, hitting 411 again, “the FBI.”

  Jay asked to be connected to the Federales in D.C., and I wondered if J. Edgar’s ghost, flitting through the Hoover building in a slip, would peg Camera Guy as just another screw-loose subversive, or something more. Rare clay, perhaps, like Lee Oswald or Jim Jones...

  “Shit. Three rings, then it disconnected. Should have known they’d be monitoring my calls.”

  “Really?” Willing to play along up to a point, I now had to pose the obvious question. “How could they know you’d call from my phone? They use remote viewing or what?”

  “Naw.” Jay waved away occult suggestions. “They have my voice print, so simply auto-scan all telecom for a match, then pull the plug.”

  “Uh-huh.” Why argue? When cornered by logic, a paranoid drops through a mental trap door, parachuting safely to la-la land below. So much for a plausible thriller. Camera Guy would have to be played for yucks.

  “You call them.” Jay thrust the phone at me. “It’s my only chance to slip under the radar. Make the call, Tim, please.”

  And say what? “Hi, Tim Wolfe here, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, please hold for a real wingnut.” Nope. Time to wrap the scene.

  Thanks for the inspiration, Jay, but I’d take over now; I was already mentally casting Crispin Glover or Johnny Depp as my Jay Max McBum. Camera Guy’s fantasy would be morphed into my own.

  “You made your calls,” I said, snatching the phone back before delivering bad news. “But I have my own problems, and if Big Brother’s after you, Jay, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded, even while deflating before my eyes.

  Pity the poor bastard for pinning his hopes on me. I’ve failed everyone who ever needed me, right? Just ask my family or any ex-girlfriend.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Be true, Tim.” With that, Jay turned and started down the stairs.

  “Good luck.” I should have quizzed him about what was on his film, but no matter. I’d have fresher ideas than whatever Jay claimed about Area 51 or George W. plotting 9/11 with his Saudi paymasters.

  Back inside, I considered jotting some notes, but I was tired and the soft mattress
beckoned. Let the encounter percolate, I decided, and had just hit the sack when I remembered my Mustang.

  Dashing back out to the patio, I saw that the car was untouched, but Jay was lingering below, over by the hedge bordering the driveway. Jesus, I help the guy out and he repays me by pissing on my doorstep?

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Get moving or I’ll call the cops!”

  Jay fled up the block, started across the street toward the Nap Time Inn. Suddenly a cop car and a black sedan squealed up, converging on him from opposite directions. He didn’t resist as a beefy cop threw him into the sedan, which sped away as I watched, agog.

  Beefy Cop surveyed the area. I ducked inside before he turned my way and stood with my back to the door, heart racing. Jay had found the cops, all right, but it wasn’t his pal from Boston.

  What if Camera Guy really was a terrorist, some sun-addled So Cal Unabomber? Gripped by the notion, I raced to the computer. A quick Google established the existence of a Marshall clan in Boston, brought to these shores in 1710 by a Welsh merchant, whose son made a fortune slave-trading and later signed the Declaration of Independence. The current patriarch, Regis Welbourne Marshall, had indeed been CIA back in the ’sixties. And yes, a Jay Maxwell Marshall was grudgingly acknowledged, a stunted limb on a family tree of go-getters. Jay had been a news photographer for Reuters in the early ‘nineties, before quitting and dropping out of sight.

  This was it, I realized excitedly, the rich seed of a story I’d been rooting for these long, fallow months. Two pots of coffee and a pack of Marlboros later, I’d hammered out twenty pages of character notes, plot ideas, questions begging answers, like just who Jay Max was running from. Jihadist sleeper cells or soulless corporate assassins?

  I’d need input from Sal. It was his job to know what baddies were in vogue, but I figured Camera Guy could be tarted up any way the suits wanted, because the soul of the thing felt real and righteous.

  It would be the saga of a wilted Flower Child, the last innocent, who stumbled across Hard Truth and is compelled to shout it to the world. Of course, the Powers That Be then move to crush him because the last thing they want trumpeted on CNN 24/7 is the goddamned truth.

  Hours flew by as I synched with my muse in the white-hot act of creation. Finally taking a break around eight, I went out for some Jack Daniels, which, coupled with the last of the coke I’d been hoarding, kept me writing until two A.M. Staggering to bed, I dropped into the deep, contented sleep of an artist inspired.

  Up at noon, I refueled on java and red-penciled last night’s output. As expected, two of every three pages were dross — unraveling plot threads, pulpy dialogue, cardboard supporting characters. Birthing art is a painful, messy business, and I soldiered on undeterred, separating the pages into a big stack for the dumpster and twelve precious pages of the good stuff.

  I left a message for Sal, then my growling stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. Totino’s party pizza in the oven, I grabbed the Union Trib off the porch and settled on the couch. Normally, the short item in the Metro section wouldn’t have rated a glance, but I’d already crossed some unmapped border, leaving normal far behind.

  MAN KILLED ON FREEWAY

  San Diego police report the hit-and-run death of an unidentified man in Mission Valley. The apparently homeless victim, estimated between 45 and 60 years old, was killed late last night while attempting to cross I-8.

  The paper slipped from my grasp as I was struck by the awful feeling that the dead man was Jay. I knew him to be enjoying the hospitality of San Diego’s finest, but a sense of certainty washed over me like a voodoo tide.

  “No,” I muttered, “I don’t believe in psychic flashes.” Only one way to find out. I called the cops and posed as Jay’s brother, inquiring about bail, then spent ten minutes on hold before the desk sergeant informed me that there was no arrest record for a Jay Maxwell Marshall.

  Stunned, I blurted out that Jay might be their hit-and-run victim. At this, the cop perked up and started quizzing me.

  I banged the phone down and marched to the kitchen to down the last blast of whiskey. It restored my reason. Odd, intuitive insights are part of life; only the superstitious read them as bulletins from above. Yet wasn’t such a reading just what the script needed? Only if I could capture Jay’s madness, distill it down to its essence, would Camera Guy become something special.

  I wrote all afternoon, words rushing forth from some place beyond me — more stenography than straining after art. I time-lined the history of my fictive Marshall clan; conjured femmes fatales to tempt Jay, villains to bedevil him.

  Finally taking a break at five-thirty, I went out for cigs and whiskey, then it was time to eat again. Ramen noodles, with local TV news on the side. A vacuous blonde reported an updated death toll from the St. Louis bombing, then her Ken-doll cohort had news of our hit-and-run.

  “...Jay Maxwell, fifty-two, son of wealthy Boston philanthropist Regis Maxwell.”

  Shit.

  I upped the volume, but the anchors were now chuckling over a snowboarding cat. Clicking off the tube, I rubbed my throbbing temples and puzzled over my prophetic flash.

  Think, Tim! Sketch scenarios but stick to reality. After grilling him, the cops must have released him to wander to his doom out on the freeway. Sure, that had to be it.

  The phone rang, further jangling my nerves. I grabbed it and barked hello, but there was nothing but a dial tone. Jay claimed the bad guys tapped his every call, and he’d used my phone twice, so if they’d been monitoring him...

  “No,” I said with deliberate calm, “there isn’t any they. Jay was a kook, probably wanted for scrawling graffiti with his own shit.”

  He was also dead now, leaving me to turn his life into fiction. That was reality, and I refused to be spooked by a strange coincidence or a dial tone. Still, I’d been cooped up for days, and needed light and space before disappearing up my own rectum.

  I put the Mustang’s top down and headed to the beach, the cool breeze quickly clearing my head. A little panic attack was a good thing. It suited the material. To capture Jay, I had to walk a mile in his orange Converses. Artists should flirt with madness, just don’t invite it to sleep over.

  Everything came into focus as I reached OB: Teenage Wasteland had been a smash indie hit because audiences are suckers for unvarnished truth, and that was the exact element all my work since had lacked. I’d unconsciously yoked myself to an assembly line as rigid as any in the Rust Belt, churning out popcorn instead of daring the high wire of genuine art. The suits aren’t the only ones hypnotized by dollar signs.

  Camera Guy scared me, both Jay’s reality and my fiction, but maybe fear was the only inoculation against hackdom...

  A wailing siren behind me scattered my thoughts. Shit, I was fifteen over the limit, with a cop car growing in the rearview. Don’t hit the brakes, just ease off the gas and be cool. Yet my whiskey breath would be reason enough to spirit me away, like Jay, and what if he’d fingered me? The cops would never buy my ignorance; their unanswered questions would eventually be punctuated by rabbit punches and the rubber hose. Maybe a cheap flight to Guantanamo.

  Sorry, Mom. I was going to come and get you soon. Really.

  The cop blew by without a glance. Laughing hysterically, I pulled over and sparked a cig with trembling hands. Jay, you really got under my skin.

  I’d planned to stroll on the beach, but after parking in the lot by the sea wall, I beelined up Newport Avenue to the Black Cat Lounge. I ordered a whiskey and absently studied the twenty-something tourists telling too-loud jokes and eyeing potential hookups with desire.

  My desire, I realized, was to get back to work. On my way out of the bar, I noticed an older, crew-cut ex-jock hunkered in a booth by the door. He followed me out of the bar and stayed half a block behind, glancing in shop windows, eyeing girls, conspicuously not seeming to follow me, which made me suspect that he was.

  At the parking lot, I passed by my Mustang and sat o
n the sea wall. Crewcut was in the same lot. He climbed into a black sedan and motored away.

  Coincidence, had to be. I refused to check the rearview all the way home. I wrote until midnight, then drank myself to sleep and was back at work when Sal called around noon with a job offer.

  “Fifty K, Tim-boy, if you can inject some yucks into Deuce Bigalow 4 — Bangkok Pool Boy.”

  My refusal left Sal speechless, and I used that rare silence to pitch Camera Guy. Waxing eloquent, I convinced him that this was the project to jump-start my career. He wanted a synopsis by Friday and promised to fast-track a pitch meeting if the pages captured the passion I’d just poured into his ear.

  With fresh enthusiasm, I returned to the keyboard and... nothing. Jay’s story must end with him broken on the freeway, but where to begin? After twenty minutes staring at a blank screen, I headed out for a stroll, brainstorming into my mini-recorder.

  “Camera Guy, scene one. We open with...”

  Halfway down the stairs, my eyes tracked to a black sedan parked directly across the street. I hesitated only an instant before marching boldly down the driveway.

  The sedan sped away.

  I lifted the recorder, shaking as I dictated. “Opening shot, exterior: black car outside the beachfront youth hostel where Jay’s staying. He emerges holding hands with Maria — Latin, busty, half his age — and we hear click, click, click as they’re photographed from the car.”

  Jay (VO)

  Words lie, pictures tell the truth. Once upon a time, my pictures did, in newspapers worldwide. Then infotainment ate the news biz and I quit looking for truth through a viewfinder. All I wanted that sunny San Diego day was to get to know Maria, but old, ugly truths were about to come looking for me.

  Yes, my opening! I raced back upstairs, back to work. Maria ditches Jay for a surfer. Back at the hostel, a note slipped under Jay’s door alludes to an Iraqi village, a place he could never forget, no matter how deep the bottle.

  Montage of stills: Jay snapping pix in desert fatigues and gas mask; stark B&W shots of corpses frozen in bloated agony, victims of an unknown biochemical horror.